In this blog post, the author shares his personal journey of pursuing his childhood dream of becoming a hacker. He recounts how he was inspired by movies, how he learned various skills in technology, and how he eventually achieved his OSCP certification. However, he also reveals that he realized he had no passion for offensive security, and that he was happier as a programmer and a cloud security engineer. He expresses his relief and excitement for his new path, and invites the readers to follow his progress.

Copilot Summary

I used to want to be a hacker.

I wanted to be a hacker, just like in the movies. When I was a child, I saw the movie, Hackers. This was back in 1995, and it changed me, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. For most of my life I didn’t follow through with this though since back in the 90’s and early 2000’s there wasn’t really much opportunity to be a white hat, since that didn’t really exist as a concept, all hackers were bad, there was no real information security, at least not like how it is today. 

I spent most of my life in technology though. I went to a trade school for electronics and continued in the electronics field in the Navy after high school, specializing in communications. After this I got a job doing electronics assembly and repair. After a few years I started messing around with spreadsheets in order to keep track of the repairs I was doing, and I started to implement simple analytics in Excel. At this time, a friend in IT at the company where I worked, told me that I should really just start using a database. From there I got into IT proper, as well as started to learn how to program. 

A long story short, I continued in IT in many forms both general and specific. Then I decided to try for my childhood dream. Times had changed and you could actually make a really good living in infosec, it was a thing now and it was legal. I studied for and received my OSCP back in 2018. I was on my way. 

Here now at the end of 2023 I’ve come to realize a lot of things. The main one is that I don’t care to be a hacker. I have no passion for offensive security, for pentesting, for red teaming. I tried. I really did. I wanted to be something so badly, that all I did, and thought was around that one goal, being a hacker. For some, that’s great, it just wasn’t for me. 

I realized that I was just LARPing as a hacker. I found myself becoming increasingly arrogant towards the “blue team” and any defensive systems. They were the enemy, and what did they know? The real cool guys in the infosec world are the hackers, all dressed in black hoodies sitting in some basement surrounded by neon lights like some cross between Mr. Robot and Cyberpunk 2077. 

There are legitimate white hats out there, they are amazing and great and do some really impressive work. That’s just not me. For the first time I’m actually happy. I’m not defeated, I’ve dealt with that a lot, I’m not burdened, I have been before with these things, but for the first time, I feel relieved. I don’t have to pretend any more. 

I am a far better programmer than I am a hacker. I am far better at DevOps than red teaming. I’m actually looking forward to working toward and getting cloud security certs for Azure, since that’s what my job is currently, a security engineer specializing in cloud security. For the first time, I’m totally okay with that, and I’m excited to start getting better at it. 

A new journey is beginning for me. I’ve made it through the Swamp of Sorrow, and Artax is no longer with me, but that’s okay, because I’m riding high on Falkor! Okay, that’s enough of that movie. Seriously though, things are good, and I look forward to posting more here as my new journey continues.